:(
the web is dead. long live the web.
This is why Mothra is the most advanced web browser. The only one to have a fully integrated “moth mode”! However, for us mere mortals I am excited about the ladybird browser as an alternative (in a couple of years most likely).
fucking betrayed i just finally dumped chrome completely
next i’ll finally move to linux and somehow every linux build will be bought up by microsoft or something
Thankfully in Linux land the evil corporation is Canonical, who aren’t really even all that evil, more like a Team Rocket (anime version) style nuisance.
Red Hat has been doing some shady shit to its downstream projects since being acquired by IBM.
Does this include Fedora?
Its more shady like business decisions regarding red hat enterprise linux and its downstream forks, not privacy/security problems. Fedora workstation isn’t really affected.
The chuds told me Mozilla was woke though?! Are you saying they’re just scummy?!
Firefox has long been going this way. I started exploring alternatives some years back, when Firefox started serving me ads on desktop, tracking me for marketing purposes on mobile, and talking about the “importance of collaboration with the private sector”. This is really just a natural progression from there.
It’s still the best browser (rock the LibreWolf branch), but it’s, ever more, just the best of a bad bunch.
The fucking nerve to say any of these Ad funded services are free or even services (does someone robbing you count as a service?) is enough to justify using guerilla warfare against these fuckers. We need to start documenting, sniffing out, exploiting, and flooding the APIs of all these ad driven sites till they become unusable. Just claim we are doing AI research. If I have to switch to command line web browsing, webscraping, and undocumented API calls via scripting to not see ads then so fucking be it.
Also, yes Mozilla, I’m sure the reason people aren’t switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.
100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.
Since they acquiesced to pressure and included DRM in the browser Mozilla has morphed into a long con exit scam for tech grifters. I find ex mozilla dev and founder jwz pretty insufferable but he was kind of right about the company and foundation. People gave them a pass for far too long. They took the google money, built an inflated non-prof using donations, and now have like the 2nd or 3rd CEO trying to scrape what little value is left there into a golden parachute. Firefox is a really small team at Mozilla. It basically exists to collect Google money.
Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.
Kind of reminds me of this shockingly based rant I saw on /g/ once that discussed that even smartphones set computing backwards.
Honestly interested in reading this if you have it saved somewhere. I have been feeling this way as someone working in tech for close to two decades and I feel more and more vindicated every day. The web of the future looks like the web of the 80s (maybe the 90s if we can behave) because these mother fuckers kill everything they touch. Technological “progress” for progress’ sake means nothing. I AM LUDDITE MAN / 410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
i just laughed at an ifunny meme i think it might be over for me
Don’t worry investors! There’s always more profit to be made finding more efficient means of killing kids in hospitals
Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.
I wasn’t always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.
Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).
Sure I can’t write full time with this model, but we’re billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that’s more than we can possibly consume.
And I’d rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.
Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone’s niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.
And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers
Completely agree! I like to limit myself to HTTP 1.1 and any website I’ll ever make will just be simple handwritten HTML with some CSS. I like to use elinks and xlinks for hypertext but in some cases – like lemmy – I’m unfortunately forced to use a bloated browser that supports JabbaScript and black magic (which makes no sense because online forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, etc. in the past all used to work without any JS). I like Gopher/Gemini a lot but I find it hard to discover interesting holes/capsules.
I tried Gemini once, honestly found Gopher to be noticeably superior, and on several fronts.
Gemini feels like someone was throwing a tantrum at the modern web and decided to overcompensate by rolling progress back like 45 years to Web 0.0001255 Standards.
How so? I’m going to tinker with both regardless, but I’m curious to know what you found lacking with Gemini so that I can evaluate it with a more critical eye.
Mostly that even for something three decades newer, it does nothing with the newness except bad things: it doesn’t allow for more than one (1) link per paragraph, if at all. Doesn’t have a concept of text alignment, text weight, spacing, italics, underline or any of the other stuff CSS 0.1 inherited from the historical printing press. To my recollection, doesn’t even allow you to use any alphabet set that is not English’s one (so stuff like math equations are out of the question), and you can’t post a link that has international characters (like the wikipedia page for “Ñandú”) without hideously percent-escaping them. In 2024.
In exchange, Gemini seems to require SSL and a certificate of all things, which means it’s a lot costlier to implement on low-end hardware and it’s noticeably vulnerable to tactics like domain seizure because you need a valid cert which means you need an external “naming authority”.
Looking at it from a distance, it feels like someone looked a Gopher and went “I wonder how would this feel in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.
On the plus side tho, thanks to the lack of anything even resembling formatting, Gemini does realize one thing that I don’t recall Gopher realizing in full: rendering of the document is under control of the viewer, not of the author. For good or bad.
Another thing I like about Gopher is that it was designed essentially to be a mounted read-only networked filesystem. Works well with the whole UNIX philosophy of “everything is a file”.
Oh I didn’t recall that part, might have to relearn some things of Ye Olde Gooden Times, but if so, that’s wonderful!
Perhaps there is something like mount.gopher in the AUR already…?I’m not sure about the Linux world, a quick search reveals https://github.com/ewe2/gopherfs which seems like it’d do the trick.
I’m dumb. So does Gemini feel like 1998 internet, or something even earlier?
It actually feels newer and fresher (kinda 2000-2002-ish) despite it technically being limited to a modeling and rendering of documents in the style and paradigm of about
19941974.Credits where it’s due, tbh.
Pack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
WHAT’S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS ADPack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protects from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
2035 - E-readers force you to watch an unskippable ad for 30 seconds between chapters. All physical books are banned.
They wouldn’t be banned, but instead they’d be like $100 and sold as these premium, artisanally-produced things to the few who can afford them.
Thus we return to the days of rote memorization and oral storytellers
“Thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this story, go to nordvpn and use promo code ‘you will never escape’ for 3% off”
This retelling of the Odyssey is brought to you by HIMS.
Arguably better than even books. It forces people to be social and have good memory.
[451]
Hear me out… what if everything you say and do, whether you consent to it or not, put on The Cloud and then regurgitated back to you as a quirky “AI” podcast?
The cloud was a mistake. I still think truly dystopian that the new Windows OS has you save things to the “OneDrive” by default rather than your actual physical harddrive. That type of shit is the realest consent manufacturing, structure superstructure, 1984, power is whatever that has the means to deem something normal-ass shit ever.
Honestly, that’s where we’re headed. I don’t know if I’m going to be interested in scrolling through websites plastered by all the ads that are going to poke through the Manifest V3 ad controls.
Retvrn. Are there any other fellow Hexbear 9 enjoyers?
Can we go back to terminals like this?
Right? I’d love to get my hands on an East German Robotron PC 1715, it just looks so good
Can you bare metal plan9 on anything? I have only ever seen it in vm.
I have it running on a x86_64 Pentium III server; works great!
There are 64-bit Pentium IIIs?
yep! (otherwise my server has a lot of explaining to do)
That screenshot was actually taken running on bare metal (an old laptop)! Everything works great as long as you don’t need a modern web browser or WiFi for anything. I’ve also gotten it running on a bunch of other random hardware I’ve had laying around, it’s very portable and works fairly well on everything I’ve messed around with so far. I’m also currently waiting for my 10 gig NIC to arrive so I can use an old machine running 9 I have laying around as a router!
Is it just a generic framebuffer for graphics or are their open source drivers for commercial gpus? I wanted to make a cheap desktop to have a permanent learning environment on but I had trouble finding good information on hardware support. What would you recommend for a system suitable for tinkering?
You’ll definitely not be doing any hardware accelerated graphics shenanigans on 9, there isn’t really any graphics drivers or anything of that sort, you just get a basic framebuffer and a library to draw basic 2D graphics which can still be plenty if you do some old school software rasterization.
For hardware support you can see an incomplete list for 9front here: https://fqa.9front.org/fqa3.html I’d say you’re probably safe to just pick up an old Dell Optiplex and some cheap generic USB peripherals and it’d probably work out of the box. I’d just double check the Ethernet situation so you can have networking since that’s kind of the whole appeal of 9. Raspberry Pis are also supported and work fairly well in my testing and 9front provides images for them on their website.
Btw, you may be interested to know people are doing 3D graphics stuff on Plan 9, it’s all in software for now but yeh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVR2R1u4N3Y
http://antares-labs.eu/isometric/9/graphics/
There’s a lot of cool stuff floating around like on http://contrib.9front.org/ or https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Contrib_index/index.html (this one is old) or just around the internet that didn’t make it into the base system (yet)
A lot of the stuff for 3D graphics is in 9front already like quaternions, basic geometric primitive drawing, matrices and vectors and related infrastructure. Just no easy way to put it all together, have to do that part yourself for now lol
We just need more Plan 9 nerds to write software for the system
Also ofc, there has been a lot of discussion like on the mailing list about accelerated graphics and how best to implement it on Plan 9 but nothing materialized yet
I would love for there to be a simple way to just interface with a graphics card directly on a low level w/o any vulkan/d3d/opengl crap in between. Just have the kernel map it to a file in /dev and to set it up and make it do stuff you just fopen() that file and write commands to it.
I’ve also been working on a software rasterizer for 9! Maybe I’ll post some screenshots here after I polish it up a bit more, lol. I got inspired after porting Quake 1 (I’m aware a port already exists, but I was bored and wanted to reinvent the wheel as a learning experience) and realizing how well it ran. Like, the Quake software renderer is seriously cool tech, way way ahead of it’s time!
Oooh that’s cool, ping me if you make a post about it
And yeah Quake engine so cool lol, I’m not too familiar with its software rasterizer though
I’ll have to read the code sometime. I’m so
about CGI, it’s good to see examples in software rather than GPU and OpenGL doing most of the work for you
I’m not too concerned about it being limited to 2d graphics. I just wanted to be sure I’d get a display output. I got an old dell lying around. Guess I’ll give it a shot. Thanks for the info and recommendation!
Wifi situation been getting better too
More drivers, WPA support, etc (assuming you run 9front)
Need to find the energy to implement some exploit mitigation tech for 9front sometime, I’m afraid to put that shit on the internet, no ASLR even :/
I wouldn’t be too worried about it honestly, I doubt anyone is scanning the internet to mess with public 9 machines. If you’re worried, just shove them on their own VLAN to keep them separate from the rest of your network.
Yeahh that’s true there’s definitely no one running exploit campaigns on Plan 9 systems lol
Although some of the code is really crusty, I feel like someone could spend a day or two just looking around and find some really nasty remote holes (that would be really easy to exploit cuz no ASLR or stack canaries or anything as far as I know)
I would use werc or something on a Plan 9 system to run my personal website I’m just worried about the above happening and using it to dox me or whatever (separate network good idea though) :(
Need to try to get werc working on OpenBSD again, it’s possible
Or I add PIE-making capability to the compilers lol (probably never gonna happen)
⑨front user here!
YESSSSS
There are some of us
Plan 9 represents a lost future and a step toward communism, this is not a bit
Living in a world where everything is connected and computing resources are shared for the betterment of humanity would be so fucking cool.
The grid will connect the world!
Yessssss
Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.
The internet is turning into an AI-generated soup that only renders properly on Chromium and tracks every one of your vital measurements to serve you optimal ads
yes consumer, your gooch width is necessary information
Tired point but the only reason Firefox works is because Google gives them some number of billions per year to make Google the default search engine
I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.
Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox
Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?
Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.
The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.
From another thread
“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” - founders of Google in 1998.
But the siren song of money always wins.
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